I love early releases of software – it gives us some of our best opportunities to listen to customers – not only about our current offerings, but those in the pipeline as well.

We’ve now entered into beta on our Release 7.3 software for physical appliances and virtual appliances (Unitrends Enterprise Backup.) If you’re a customer – or a free user – we encourage you to send us an e-mail at [email protected] to participate, or you can sign up here. Features of Unitrends 7.3 include:

Windows instant recovery in the cloud. One of our most popular features is the that we allow instant recovery (technically sometimes called failover virtualization) for physical Windows systems. In release 7.3, we now enable that same functionality at the replication target for our physical appliances. This currently applies to only private replication targets; the Unitrends Cloud will be offering this in the first half of 2015.

VMware vSphere template protection. With VMware templates, you can increase efficiency by avoiding many repetitive configuration and installation tasks. Once you have created a virtual machine (VM), you can create a template of the VM which you can then use to deploy additional VMs very quickly. With release 7.3, you can now back up and restore VMware templates. Templates can be restored as templates or as new virtual machines, enabling you to deploy a VM in minutes.

VMware vSphere 5.5 (ESX/ESXi 5.5) support. Virtual environments running under vSphere 5.5 can now be protected with Unitrends backup, archiving, and disaster recovery appliances. Choose from full, differential, and incremental backups using the Change Block Tracking (CBT) technology. The protected virtual machine data can then be archived to rotational media or replicated off‐site for disaster recovery. For mission‐critical servers, slash DR time to meet any RTO by setting up VMware Instant Recovery. With instant recovery your VM can be up and running nearly instantaneously. Your VMware ESXi 5.5 virtual infrastructure can also be leveraged to deploy Unitrends Enterprise Backup for VMware.

Domain Name Server (DNS) support for Linux and Mac OS X. With release 7.3, you have the option to use DNS instead of static IP when adding Linux and Mac OS X clients to the system. This option is especially useful if you use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) for client IP address assignment in your environment, as IP addresses may change.

Enhanced reporting. With release 7.3, select email reports can now be viewed in PDF format. The PDF version is sent as an attachment to the HTML email report you receive.

System performance enhancements. Performance enhancements increase operational speed and the efficiency of resource utilization. They also optimize deduplication ratios for VMware backups which in turn improves not only storage utilization but also replication performance.

Again – whether you’re a paying customer or a free user, would love to have you participate in our beta (at [email protected] or sign up on our website here.)